Tag Archives: D&D Encounters

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 10

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The third and final chapter of this season of Encounters began tonight. I was running my usual 5:00 table, but I’d also been asked to run a second table at 7:00 (I guess there’s been some kind of DM shortage).

For the 5:00 table I had lots of my regulars – the first timer from week 1 along with the friend he’s been bringing, the father and son new players from last week, another father and son pair, and two other guys who’ve been coming pretty regularly.

Yes, if you’re counting, that’s eight players. We’d normally split up into two groups of four each, but we didn’t have another dungeon master, so I bit the bullet and ran with eight.

No one was at third level yet – I believe there were three people at level 2 and five at level 1. The encounter as written assumes a party of five characters of level 2-3, so scaling was interesting.

The party had the chance to take an extended rest back at the Old Owl Inn after dawn. In the afternoon, Grimbold (the captain of the Duponde town guard) came to the players to ask them to investigate a monastery a few hours’ walk to the west of town. The skeletons that had menaced the town the previous night were dressed in cassocks consistent with the long-abandoned Saint Avarthil Monastery. It seemed that someone had been reanimating the dead monks’ bones and turning them into monsters. Sure sounds like the evil wizard who’s on the loose!

Off they went to Saint Avarthil’s. The door to the crypt was open, and the adventurers trooped on in. The inside was well-lit by magical braziers, and lots of niches in the walls that once held buried monks had been broken open and stood empty. Soon enough, a couple of cassocked skeletons were found, and the battle began.

Saint Avarthil Crypt Map - Gridded

Saint Avarthil Crypt Map - No Grid

The 5:00 table of eight players ended up facing off against about 12 skeleton minions, a blazing skeleton (hello old friend from last week!) and a trio of dark ones – little shadowy guys with hooves and nasty short swords. We had a bit of a bottleneck at the top of the stairs until the minions were finished off, and then the dark ones started wrecking PCs with their double sword attacks. One of them kept getting knocked into the crevasse, though, which made for fun times. The player characters took a pretty good beating (a first-level thief foolishly rushed into the middle of melee and paid for it) but prevailed.

The 7:00 table had four players (one of whom was a fellow player from my Monday night Pathfinder game), and they were all third level (now that’s dedication!). Since they were a little higher level than expected for the encounter and there were only four of them instead of five, I decided to run it as written with eight skeletal minions, one blazing skeleton and two dark ones. This table rocked the encounter with little difficulty, despite a long series of failed saving throws against ongoing fire damage from the party’s vampire.

I had fun running this encounter, especially getting to do it a second time when I was a little better at making it interesting. I had one of the dark ones sneak around behind the party as they went into the main crypt, which was fun for me at least. I also really like the map. It was fun to re-create in MapTool, and I think it turned out quite nicely.

I’m also happy to report that I’m done putting the adventure together in MapTool. I’ve been trying to work a week or two ahead throughout the season, and I’m finally finished with all thirteen encounters. The map for week 12 is also awesome and I’m looking forward to showing off my version of it here on the blog.

I’ll be running next week twice, and possibly week 12 (Andy will be back to run a table that week, but it seems clear that we might need a second DM). Week 13 I won’t be here – I’ll be at GenCon! I’m a little sad that I won’t be able to finish the adventure with my awesome players, but let’s face it – I’m not going to be too broken up about the fact that I’ll be stuck at the greatest four days in gaming for the first time ever. I’m excited!

Previous weeks:

No week 6 – I was out of town

Becoming “in-demand” as a DM

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Three independent incidents in the past few weeks have made me realize that, at least in my local D&D community, I’m becoming somewhat “in-demand” as a Dungeon Master.

First, the person who coordinates Living Forgotten Realms games at my local store asked me if I would be willing to DM a paragon-tier game for a charity event on July 30. Not the biggest deal in the world, I suppose, but I was flattered to be requested. After figuring out that I should have enough time to prep everything I need to prep, I agreed to run the game.

Second, the person who is coordinating D&D games for the Tacticon convention over Labor Day weekend asked if I would be willing to run an epic tier game (an all-day event) at the con. He did a good job of flattery on this one, making it clear that he was specifically approaching a small number of DMs who he thought could run a challenging adventure and make it fun for the players at a convention. Since I’m planning to iron man the convention anyway (running games for every slot), I agreed.

Third, the owner of the local store approached me yesterday about D&D Encounters. I’ve been running a table every other week at 5:00 PM (alternating with the excellent Andy), and the store owner wanted to know if I’d be willing to run a second table at 7:00 for the next few weeks, as there’s been a DM shortage. Sure, I can handle that.

In addition, the owner also asked if I’d be interested in running the next season of Encounters, seeking my input on how he should try to arrange things with dungeon masters. I really like running Encounters since I love introducing new players to the game and Encounters is an ideal way to do this. Unfortunately, Wednesday night is bowling night in the fall. My wife and I don’t have a lot of organized activities we do together, but bowling is one of them, and we have some good friends who bowl on Wednesdays, so I’ll probably have to decline.

However, I did offer my opinion that the best way to schedule DMs for Encounters is to have one DM assigned to each slot (5:00 PM table 1, 5:00 PM table 2, 7:00 PM table 1, 7:00 PM table 2) and then an alternate for each DM that the primary person can call on if they’re going to be out of town or too busy or whatever. While I couldn’t serve as a primary DM, I could probably be a 5:00 PM alternate (missing a week of bowling every now and then, or just showing up a little late). I appreciated being asked for my input.

I feel like I’m at a pretty good place right now with my dungeon mastering. My Friday night online game is going strong. Running D&D Encounters has been a lot of fun. I ran my Tallinn’s Tower adventure for LFR on Thursday (more to come on that later – I’m making some revisions based on feedback from the recent game) and will  be running the final adventure in my trilogy after GenCon.  And I’m really looking forward to three and a half days of non-stop dungeon mastering at TactiCon in a couple of months.

Going from being a total newbie as a dungeon master a year ago to the point where people are actually asking me to run events is a pretty good feeling!

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 9

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For the second week in a row we had very few players at start time, but plenty showed up a few minutes later. And so we delved deeper into the Dark Legacy of Evard in D&D Encounters.

This week we had two of our long-time players, playing a half-orc knight and a dwarf weaponmaster. We had a player who’s very new to D&D bring his half-elf sentinel. And we had a father and son who were brand-new to the game and who decided to play the pre-generated eladrin warpriest and drow hunter. Huzzah for new players!

I took a little time to explain the basic workings of the game to the new players, as well as a few minutes to bring everyone up to speed on the plot so far, so we got started a bit late. I wasn’t worried, since we only had five players and my use of MapTool for running the game tends to make things go quickly in general.

Well, we got into some trouble and ran late! The evening began with a skill challenge. The party was patrolling Duponde at night and realized that the despair effect of the Shadowfell was getting to them and to the rest of the townsfolk, especially the guards. Everyone tried their best to cheer people up, but without much luck. The warpriest’s rousing speech fell flat (though the sentinel followed up with a stronger rendition). The weaponmaster’s acrobatic tricks ended up with the man on his face (though the drow showed him how it was done). Insight wasn’t helpful in figuring out how to reach the people, either.

This meant that the party failed the skill challenge, which meant that despair overcame the guards and they fled rather than fought when combat broke out. Each player also drew a card from the despair deck, some of which were quite problematic (the knight ended up vulnerable 2 to all damage for the battle).

Town with canal and bridges - no grid

Town with canal and bridges - gridded

Combat began with the party spotting some decrepit skeletons and one blazing skeleton on the far bridge (I scaled the battle down to include only one blazing skeleton, since we had mostly first-level characters and several new players). The PCs rolled initiative and started taking care of the minions. The vulnerable knight went after the blazing skeleton on his own and paid dearly, burning himself badly and ending up unconscious and without healing surges, far from his allies. The sentinel made his way over (after losing his bear companion once) and gave the knight a Healing Word, but it only restored 2 hit points (the value of the d6 roll) since the poor knight was surgeless. This meant that his ongoing fire damage knocked him unconscious at the beginning of his next turn, and he failed death save number 2.

The drow and warpriest stayed on the west side of the armory to fight a couple of skeletons and a shadow that appeared (thankfully for them, the shadow kept missing). The warpriest had the bright idea (pun intended) of using Sun’s Glow on the shadow, lighting him up. I liked the creative use of the spell and ruled that it turned off the shadow’s normal insubstantiality.

The weaponmaster, for some reason, decided to start the battle by chucking his grappling hook up to the roof of the library and spent the first two rounds climbing the side of the building, walking across the roof, and then jumping off near the canal – hurting himself in the process since he wasn’t trained in acrobatics. This didn’t help the party’s chances. He eventually made his way over to the fallen weaponmaster, with the sentinel also closing in to help.

All three of those PCs were unconscious by the time the warpriest and hunter had finished off the shadow and their minions.  The warpriest was out of Healing Words, but he could made heal checks – one to stabilize the dying knight and one to let the sentinel use his second wind (whereupon the sentinel used his last Healing World to bring the weaponmaster back into the fight).

The weaponmaster pushed the blazing skeleton into the canal, which I ruled was quite bad for the skeleton (fire in water, you know) and treated it as falling damage. The skeleton survived and came after the hunter, but the weaponmaster circled around and shoved him back into the canal, finishing him off at last.

This was a brutal battle, though I know this was in part because we had some new players and in part because the weaponmaster basically sat out two rounds. I ended up being pretty generous as the battle wore on. The weaponmaster claimed he had a power that would push the target on a hit or a miss; I was dubious, but the PCs needed all the help they could get.

Still, we had a lot of fun and a lot of tension. The father/son pair definitely had a blast, and I stayed afterward to talk to them about the game. The son bought a mini for his drow hunter, and the father picked up a copy of the Rules Compendium. The store was sold out of Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, but I wrote down the titles for him and suggested he also check out D&D Insider if he decides they’re going to keep playing. The father said they would probably be back next week – the son said they DEFINITELY would.

I love bringing new players into the game!

Previous sessions:

No week 6 – I was out of town

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 8

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This week I had the pleasure of enjoying D&D Encounters as a player at Andy’s table. As the start time of 5:00 rolled around there were only three players present, but we ended up with seven (so we ran one extra-large table).

The party had just finished exploring the basement of the Vontarin estate last week, taking on a gang of tieflings and discovering the the wizard Nathaire, possessed by Vontarin’s ghost, had apparently come to the estate, looked for something, not found it, and left in frustration. So, we returned to Duponde.

As night fell, Grimbold (captain of the town watch) asked the party to either defend some townsfolk who had taken refuge in the armory, or investigate reports of a small humanoid in the black hood near the south gate. The humanoid sounded like it might be Nathaire’s halfling assistant, so we took that route.

We spotted the humanoid through the window of a house, but before we could approach we were set upon by plant creatures. I was playing a Mage and had a good time blasting a bunch of twig minions. The party seemed to work pretty well together, and we really didn’t have too much trouble taking down the plants and then the humanoid, who turned out to be a shadow creature.

  

We took the shadow man alive and questioned him about what he was doing. He confessed that Nathaire hired him, and the wizard was working on building an army of skeletons at a nearby monastery. Ooh – creepy!

No maps this week, as just like week 5 we used a map that’s available on the Wizards of the Coast web site for DDI subscribers. But hey, at least I included the tokens I created for the plant monsters!

Previous sessions:

No week 6 – I was out of town

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 7

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I was out of town last week, so I wasn’t running or playing in D&D Encounters. But hey, since I had already put the maps together for Week 6, I figured I might as well share them here.

For Week 7 tonight, I had a table of seven players. Six of them had apparently played together last week (including David, the die-hard who was brand new to Encounters but who’s been there every week so far – rock on!). The party last week had fought a bunch of tieflings who had apparently taken up residence in the home of the long-dead wizard Vontarin, and this week they were delving into the house’s basement via a trap door.

Below the trap door was a long, skinny staircase with an imp statue at the end of it. Our warpriest had a high enough passive perception to realize that there was a trap at hand, triggered by a very faint glyph on the floor at the foot of the stairs. The party’s thief tried to disarm the trap, failed horribly, and set off flames all over himself and the warpriest (oops). The hunter in the party then remembered the password they had discovered upstairs and said it… and then stood there, rather than walking past the statue. Nothing happened.

The thief took another crack at disabling the trap and succeeded this time, so the party moved into a room with three pits – dry cisterns. This is something new that I loved about this evening’s session – for the first time, the party had a chance to do some exploring of a location where each opened door didn’t lead immediately to a fight.

Beyond the cistern room lay a hallway with a big cloud of purple smoke. It turned out to be remnants from an already-triggered trap. At the far end of the hall were two sets of iron doors – one to the east, and another to the north. The northern doors showed signs of having previously been chained and sealed with a bronze plaque to Pelor. The eastern doors were unchained. The adventurers decided to go east.

To the east was a room filled with empty cages, but very lively tieflings, two of whom soon turned into clouds of smoke. The party started beating on this room of enemies…

Only to be surprised when the northern doors burst open and a tiefling warlock started wrecking them with flames. Bwah ha ha!

The hunter did some quick thinking and dropped a zone of mist in the hallway intersection that provided the party with a lot of protection. He then took a shot at the warlock and hit – but the warlock’s infernal wrath dropped the hunter to unconsciousness. The party’s knight fell soon after, but they were taking turns with unconsciousness, letting the warpriest bring them both back.

I had a ton of fun running this fight. I loved the “round one – bad guys to the east; round two – bad guys to the north” which gave the battle a good flow. Lots of moving around, lots of careful thinking. Minions that deal damage on a miss were also intriguing – I’ve never seen that before. The battle ended with the hunter completely out of surges; some of the party expected that this was the last encounter before an extended rest. Oh no no no…

I was also happy that the adventure designers are finally handing out some loot to the PCs. This battle gave out a magic staff, magic armor, and a bunch of cash. Now back to town to spend it, trying to figure out where the possessed wizard has gone.

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 5

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This week marked the beginning of the second adventuring day for the intrepid travelers in the town of Duponde. A total of eight players showed up this week, so we split into two tables of four each. My table had:

  • Garro the hunter (the new player from week 1, now with a leveled-up PC!)
  • Sever the paladin (the new player’s friend, brand-new to D&D)
  • Markus the cleric (the replacement PC for the one I killed in week 1)
  • Jarren the mage

Having survived a night in the Shadowfell, the players napped through the morning back at the beloved Old Owl Inn, feeling a little shaky when they awoke (I’m using the Despair Deck, so they all drew a card). Some of the PCs spent some time studying the mysterious journal they had discovered at Evard’s tomb; it belonged to the wizard Nathaire who had disappeared from the Old Owl, and it was written in code. They haven’t fully deciphered it yet, but they’re making progress.

A young Vistani boy (basically a gypsy) came to the heroes to tell them that his grandmother Grivelda had a vision and needed to tell the heroes about it. She saw them as being the key to stopping whatever had happened to Duponde. We had a nice bit of role playing with Grivelda, with the PCs very interested in asking her about her visions. Three of them volunteered to have their palms read (two with poor results). They got the impression that she might know a thing or two about potion making, and I allowed them to make diplomacy checks to see if they could persuade her to whip up a healing potion, but none of them were very diplomatic (the best roll was an 8; I set the DC at 10). Oh well.

Before long, Grivelda’s grandson came running into the house, crying out that wolves were coming, along with a werewolf. As written, the battle starts with the PCs inside the house, but I thought the battle would be more interesting outside (the house was tiny), so I let them move outside as a free action when we rolled initiative.

Since there were only 4 PCs and most of them were level 1, I scaled the battle down. I threw two wolves at them instead of three, and I leveled the werewolf down by one level on the fly (reduced HP by 8, reduced defenses by 1 each). I left his attacks and damage alone.

The werewolf won initiative and rushed into battle, coming after the nearest target – the cleric (whose predecessor character from the same player, remember, I had killed in week 1). He went into his lycanthropic fury, in which he makes both a claw and a bite attack and deals himself 5 damage in the process. The claw was a critical hit, dealing a bunch of damage and knocking the cleric to the ground; fortunately, the bite missed.

The hunter in the party climbed onto the roof of the house and took at shot at a wolf  – and missed. The cleric used his turn to stand up, smack the werewolf, and then a minor action to increase the party’s AC for the encounter (rather than heal himself). One wolf came after the wizard while the other climbed up onto the roof after the hunter – who was quite surprised to have company up there!

The paladin and wizard went to work on the ground-bound wolf, and then Grivelda gave the werewolf a dirty look to turn off his regeneration (which ended up being hugely important) and his disease-bearing nature. The werewolf got back to savaging the cleric, who decided to heal the hunter on the roof instead of himself. This ended up being a mistake, as the werewolf dropped the cleric unconscious in the third round.

Eventually the mage started wrecking the ground foes with arc lightning and the paladin started drawing their attention. The hunter climbed off the roof and was pounced on from the roof by the wolf, who dropped him unconscious. Meanwhile, the cleric was busy failing death saves.

The mage’s dice were hot, and she started dropping the enemies one after the other. The last wolf tried to run but was met with a magic missile in the back.

Unfortunately, this was too late for the cleric, who failed three straight death saves. Pow. And once again, I killed one of Chris’s characters. Man, did I feel bad! But really, the dice just betrayed him. If he had just made one of those saves, he would have pulled through.

The other table breezed right through the encounter; maybe I should have scaled it down even farther. Well, so it goes. At least Grivelda was able to bring the cleric back with a four-healing-surge penalty, so Markus lives to fight another day!

No map this time, since I used the official Wizards of the Coast map for this one (it’s a map from Reavers of Harkenwold, which they put on their web site). If you’re a DDI subscriber, you can get the map here.

Previous sessions:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 4

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I wasn’t expecting to be running D&D Encounters this week. Our local store has tried to set up a rotation so that no DM is running two weeks in a row (to prevent burnout). Thus, I ran the first 5:00 PM table on week 1, Andy ran it week 2, I ran it week 3, and Andy was scheduled to run it week 4 (this week). Wes has been the second table DM for all three weeks, but we haven’t had a second 5:00 PM table yet (we had only six players for each of the first three weeks).

However, I got an email from the store owner today asking me if I could be available to run a second table in case it was needed; Wes was unavailable. We haven’t had a second table yet, but hey, school’s out now – you never know.

So, I showed up at the store at 4:30 (I’m so glad to have a job with some flexible hours!) and set up my projector rig, just in case. It was a good thing that I did: We had 14 players! That meant two overly-full tables of seven players each. Woo hoo!

My table consisted of one player who had been attending most of this season of Encounters, one player who’s attended past seasons of Encounters, and five first-time Encounters players (two of whom were very new to D&D altogether – awesome!). The party was:

  • Hiver the Dwarf Fighter
  • Steven the Half-Elf Sentinel (our regular)
  • Chilliax the Drow Executioner (thanks again to Wielding a Bohemian Ear Spoon!)
  • Keira the Elf Thief
  • Balin the Elf Mage (a red box character!)
  • Fargrim the OTHER Dwarf Fighter
  • Thetari the Dwarf Cleric of Death

The session began with some recapping of the prior three sessions (since only one of the players had been present for any of them). This meant that it was tough to do much role playing; we pretty much just got the mission from the local cleric to head to the graveyard, since he believed all of the shadow troubles began there.

The players all made Perception checks as they entered the graveyard, none of which were especially great. This meant that the party saw some zombies shambling toward them, but they DIDN’T see the ghouls or shadows lying in wait. The ghouls actually acted very early in the initiative order, successfully attacking from hiding and throwing two characters to the ground and grabbing them. The rest of the party rushed to the rescue, with one ghoul getting pushed away by Smite Undead from the cleric and the other being Hypnotized by the Mage and forced to walk away, breaking both grabs (nice teamwork!).

Graveyard map for session 4 of Dark Legacy of Evard - with grid

Graveyard map for session 4 of Dark Legacy of Evard - no grid

When the shadows oozed out of the trees near the end of the first round, the brief panic around the table was awesome – “There are MORE monsters?!” The shadows did what they do, melding with PCs and draining their life for several turns. Zombies grabbed characters and started smashing them.

In the end, though, this party of largely fresh characters will full healing surges, action points and daily powers made short work of a graveyard full of undead monsters. Since I had more than the five PCs that the encounter was written for, I followed the guidelines and added one more zombie. Normally I would have added two, or perhaps even a zombie and a ghoul, but since so many players were new to the game I didn’t want to overdo it. I needn’t have worried – they rocked the encounter.

After the monsters were dead, we had a little more time for role playing. The adventurers examined the mausoleum of Evard’s tomb and saw that the main sarcophagus had been forced open and that some kind of magical curse had blasted whoever opened it. It was clear that the zombies were recently-killed workers who had helped to break into the tomb, but the wizard Nathaire and his halfling assistant were nowhere to be found. The group did, however, find a journal written in code that belonged to the halfling. The plot thickens!

After the party left the mausoleum, the sun came up and Duponde shifted back out of the Shadowfell. Ah, but for how long?

Previous sessions:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 3

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I had the pleasure of stepping back into the role of Dungeon Master for Week 3 of the current D&D Encounters season. When the start time for the game rolled around, only one player had showed up, but five more came in the next few minutes and away we went!

Tonight’s group consisted of:

  • David (the brand-new 4e player from week 1) playing his drow hunter (the only character to have shown up in all three encounters so far)
  • Dan with his half-orc knight
  • Chris with his half-elf warpriest (his replacement character after I killed off his revenant in week 1)
  • Chris’s daughter Allison with the pre-generated human mage Jaren,
  • Two new Encounters players, starting with Nick and his pre-gen vampire Constanz (thanks to Wielding a Bohemian Ear Spoon for generating these!)
  • And finishing with Nick’s friend Ofir and his Bohemian Ear Spoon pre-gen blackguard Klaxu

The party members who had played last week (the hunter, warpriest and mage) had defended the armory, so this week we continued that story with the town guard captain begging the group to search Duponde for shadow monsters and to protect the panicking citizens.

To the skill challenge!

This was the first skill challenge of this Encounters season, and I think it was the first time most of the players had been in one. I tend to be a “don’t tell the players they’re in a skill challenge” kind of DM; I prefer to lay out the situation and ask them how they want to deal with it, asking for skill checks as appropriate.

The group came up with some creative skill uses (History to see if they remembered any maps of the city to help them figure out what areas might be vulnerable to attack; Athletics plus darkvision to climb onto a roof to look for trouble, Heal to help out injured townspeople). Sometimes I let this give someone else a +2 to their next roll, and sometimes I let it count as a skill check of its own.

Ultimately, this group had one of the most efficient skill challenges I’ve seen, in that they racked up three failures in a hurry! I believe they had only two successes (out of six) when they hit their third failure. Even though the adventure didn’t specifically call for it in this particular skill challenge (it did for the other branch skill challenge for this session), I gave out cards from the Despair Deck from the Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond box set whenever characters failed a skill check. I described it as the PC heading down an alley, seeing a horrible shadow apparition that quickly faded, and being freaked out by it. One ended up Craven, one Jittery and one Delusional.

Town Map - Dark Legacy of Evard Session 3, with grid

Town Map - Dark Session of Evard Session 3, no grid

Once the battle started, with the monsters getting a surprise round and the PCs not getting an attack bonus thanks to the failed skill challenge, the Craven PC (the hunter) spent the first round climbing onto the roof of a building. I felt that was appropriately Craven behavior, so I handed him a bonus point token.

I only had the Dusk Beasts visibly act during the surprise round. One of them charged the warpriest, one moved close to the front of the party, and one started coming around behind them. In the second round, the two Leeching Shadows revealed themselves, and one glued itself to the blackguard and literally stayed on him for the entire encounter (that shadow was the last enemy to go, because the blackguard failed four saves in a row). When the Shadow Bolter popped out from around a building and shot the warpriest in the gut, the group started worrying about a potential TPK.

The second and third rounds got better, though. Even though both the knight and the blackguard ended up unconscious, the party started taking care of the bad guys. A shadow minion dropped, and the Dusk Beasts started getting bloodied and finally dying. Once one dropped, the others fell in short order. The warpriest was planning to revive the blackguard, but when the blackguard’s player said “Halleluja!” the warpriest’s player said, “I’m sorry, I’m a priest of death and I can’t support that kind of thing – I’ll save the knight instead.” He was kidding, but I promised him a bonus point if he would actually do that because of his character, so he did. I later awarded him renown points for a Moment of Greatness there.

The Shadow Bolter was planning to flee, but the revived knight stepped in, hit him and slowed him, dashing that plan. A gang-up on the bad guy ensued, and the warpriest dropped the monster with non-lethal damage.

Once the blackguard finally shook off his shadow and the party squashed it, they turned to questioning the Bolter. This was some fun impromptu role playing (for me at least). The party wanted to know how the shadow man got to Duponde, who he worked for, etc. He was confused, though, because from his perspective Duponde and its people had invaded his land and he was just defending himself against the horrid light-bearers.

I really am enjoying DMing this season of Encounters. It’s a fun adventure so far, and I’ve got a fun group of players at the table. I’ll live with the every other week role I’m given (Andy, it’s only fair to let you run some of these – you’re an awesome DM!), but I can definitely see myself wanting to run this adventure for another group in the future in a home campaign.

D&D Encounters Dark Legacy of Evard – Week 2

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My friendly local game store has set things up so that DMs are alternating weeks of running D&D Encounters this season, rather than having the same DM run the game every single week. That’s fine by me, although since I think I’ll probably want to run this adventure again someday, I’m preparing all of the encounters in MapTool. I’ll  be ready to go any week. As of this writing, I’m prepared through week 5.

But for week 2, I was a player rather than a DM. I threw together a character at the last minute – a dwarf warpriest named Gronk (I know that the table only had one leader last week and I thought a second might help). When I got to the table, we initially had a party of three leaders and three controllers. Okay…

Given that I’m not passionately invested in D&D Encounters as a player, I agreed to run a pre-generated character of a different role, so I ended up playing Brandis the paladin. One of the people who had brought a controller had a striker in reserve, so he switched to that, and off we went.

Week 2 of Dark Legacy of Evard was cool in that the players had a choice – they could either chase after a suspicious halfling who had tried to kill the captain of the guard, or they could try to get monsters out of the town armory so that the townsfolk could equip themselves against the evil onslaught of badness. Our group went with the armory.

The encounter itself turned out to be a fight against some spider swarms, deathjump spiders and shadow minions. I’m really enjoying the “meld with the target” ability of these shadow creatures – very spooky and flavorful. My paladin got the snot beat out of him, as was his job, but the two leaders in the party kept him coming back for more, and we ultimately defeated the enemies.

The new player from week 1 who was running a Hunter and who had only two healing surges after the first week’s combat managed to stay out of the melee and shoot things from afar this time, sustaining no damage. The party worked well as a group, and victory was achieved.

Even though I didn’t end up using the maps I had created for this encounter in MapTool (since I wasn’t DMing), I thought I’d share them here anyway, just in case anyone else would like to use them. There are two different maps – one for the armory and one for chasing the halfling through the woods. Each map is presented both with and without a grid and is formatted to a 50-pixel grid.

Halfling pursuit forest map - with grid

Halfling pursuit forest map - no grid

Armory with bridges map - with grid

Armory with bridges map - no grid

Recruiting RPG players via Magic: The Gathering

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Last night I went back to my old game for the first time in a year and a half: Magic: The Gathering. Yes, I know it’s widely derided in the RPG community, and ever since I started playing D&D I hadn’t been playing Magic.

But last night I wasn’t running my usual Friday night online game (sorry again for not being ready, gang!) and my wife was busy, so I decided to stop by my friendly local game store for Friday Night Magic.

Back when I played Magic regularly, my format of choice was called booster draft. This is where you open up a pack of cards, pick one, and pass the rest on. You take the next pack from the person sitting to your right, pick one, and pass the rest on. You keep doing this through three packs of cards and ultimately build a deck out of the cards you pick. It rewards good evaluation of the cards rather than a good budget to build a prepared deck of rare cards – much more my style.

I used to be quite good at booster drafting – my rating for that format put me among the top 20 players in Colorado. Last night, though, I was playing with cards that I had never seen at all, and was rusty in my play skills. I fully expected to do poorly, and I was okay with that (I was proud of having a good rating in the past, but it was never that a big deal to me).

The first good thing about last night was that somehow, despite not knowing ANY of the cards, I managed to win the draft! My first opponent was a first-time drafter, so I guess I would be expected to win that match. My second and third opponents were regular drafters, though, and I won a couple of close, hard-fought matches. That was a good feeling.

The second good thing was that I used the opportunity to try to recruit new D&D players! A couple of people at the draft were a pair of brothers, both of whom were familiar with D&D 3.5 but who were looking for a regular game and who had some interest in 4th Edition. I told them about D&D Encounters and Living Forgotten Realms, and I think they might come to check out Encounters. They’re really looking for an ongoing home campaign and actually asked if they could join my Friday night game, but that game is already VERY full.

So, despite the fact that I wasn’t playing RPGs last night, they were still on my mind. As for Magic, I like this quantity of play. I can see myself popping into a draft once or twice a year in the future, just to see how my skills hold up. It’s fun to see all new cards, too. And hey, if I can go into a draft completely cold and still do well, that’s a good feeling.